Choices Are Never Easy and Never Right
by BlackMoonShine
Summary: Set in the future. It's been 18 years since they were a part of the xmen. Now all of a sudden the xmen step back in their lives when all they've tried to do is raise their children normally. What will they do when everything they're tried to keep hidden?
1. Chapter 1

Thin, long fingered, hands were poised above the keys of the piano. It was an old Jesse French, caramel colored wood, a battered and well loved piano. There was no sheet music sitting crisp and ready on the book holder. The fingers delicately ran their tips along the ivory and ebony keys that say like bones in the mouth of a beautiful beast. Short nails bitten to the quick painted with chipped black. Hemp and twisted metal bracelets covered her wrists. She wore a dark blue V neck shirt, showing off her newly discovered breasts. It drove the boys wild and made her father crazy, though her mother liked to joke that he himself would have been one of those boys when they had first met. He would give her a ghost of a smile before coming upstairs, usually to this very piano. Her mother would just smile. She was barefoot (she took after her father in that way) and was wearing a pair of baggy jeans that were broken in like an extra skin, soft life a dollar that had been in your pocket for ages.

When she had asked as a young girl why her mother why her father spent so much time up here at the piano "playing stupid songs by dead people that don't even have a beat", she had laughed. Her mother had asked him that very same question when they had first bought this house, first bought the piano from an old woman across town that they didn't even know. He father's voice asking her to come with him caused her to jump and she felt embarrassed that she had been caught. She had expected him to be angry or hurt, but he just had on that same amused_I-know-something-you-don't_ smile. He had taken her little hand in his big callused one and led her upstairs. She kept her head lowered because she thought for sure that she was about to get hollered at or spanked or _something_. Instead he had sat her on his lap even though she was seven years old, count 'em! Seven! And much to old to be sitting on her daddy's lap.

His big hands began to play a familiar oldies song that he often played around the house. Fiona Apple's song Paper Bag was one of her secret favorites, thought not so secret since her father knew. Her eyes examined his hands moving fluidly over the keys. She noticed that the third one over from the middle kind of stuck. Her sharp ears picked up on the different tones, the different vibrations of each note. Now eager to play she tried to shove her hands in with her fathers. The playing stopped and she was afraid that she had done something wrong to stop the music. He had chuckled though. He explained that you can't just start in the middle. You have to start from the beginning, the _very_ beginning to learn how to play. He rummaged through a stack of books on top of the piano. He handed her a battered book. She opened it and saw little black ants of ink dotted along the lines and running through the pages. He told her that he had kept it in case she had ever wanted to learn. He started to teach her right then.

Now ten years later she was still sitting at that very piano. They had to force her away from it, but thankfully in another month she would be going to the arts college in near by Boston. It had taken begging and pleading on her part to get them to agree, but in the end they had. Either by her masterful manipulation, or they wanted more time by themselves to pop out some more kids. He brothers were currently in bed, one 8, the other 10. She tried not to think about that. Old people sex was bad enough, but did anyone really want to think about their parents? Her friends had stories of walking in on their parents. Thankfully hers were subtle about that kind of thing. Her parents were the oddest couple on the block by far, but they also were the coolest, the envy of her friends. After all, their parents didn't have such cool stories.

The doorbell rang franticly and she looked out the window by the piano. She could see somebody but she couldn't tell who it was.

"Who 's it?" Zaq asked, standing in the doorway. Laurie was sitting up in bed. Both of them looked half asleep and confused.

"Go back to bed, it's nobody." They obeyed. She crept down the stairs and grabbed her fathers cane, the plain wooden one that he saved for when his father came over. She opened the door and before she could swing it at the shadow that lurked outside her door, a half ice man with his side soaked in blood fell through the door and landed on her. She caught him in her arms, shocked and not really sure what to do. She closed the door behind he with her foot, still unsure. Maybe he was faking it.

She reached for the phone.

"No." He grabbed her arm. She thought of hitting him, but he whispered "please". She half carried half guided him to the couch. She knew better than to be shocked by his appearance (after all, he was half covered in ice). Her parents were mutants, she herself was a mutant. Her parents had taught her tolerance and acceptance. She just wasn't sure if she should be this accepting of a stranger who could quite possibly be a psycho.

He smiled dizzily at her and was amazed at just how very blue his eyes were. "You're parents will be able to help." He paused. "If they want to of course." He didn't seem so sure of the idea that they would indeed help him. And she had no clue how he knew her parents. He seemed to guess her thoughts. "We used to work together when they were younger. We had a...falling out though." She was confused. Her parents had never mentioned working with mutants.

His breathing was heavy, but when she reached for the phone again he told her not to. "A hospital wouldn't know what to do. It's just a scratch. You're mom can fix it up easy and send me on my way."

Ten minutes they heard laughing and quiet talking outside. "Mom" She called, loud enough so they could here, but not loud enough to wake her brothers. They must have heard her panic, after all, for the last 15 minutes she had been sitting on the couch with a man covered in ice who was bleeding on her shirt as he was basically laying down in her lap.

Her parents must have heard the panic in her voice because they came through the door looking concerned. Her mother looked first shocked then concerned as she rushed over to help the man. For some strange reason she couldn't understand, her father had looked first slightly surprised and then angry. He walked up stairs. Her mother looked worried.

"Roisin, will you check on him?"

The iced man looked awkward for a moment. He laid a hand on her mother's shoulder. "I'm sorry." She just shook her head. Roisin went up to find her father.

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Can you guess the pairing?

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	2. Chapter 2

Her father was sitting at the piano. He was still, just staring at the wall.

Roisin walked over and draped her arms around his neck. He touched her arm and leaned into her. She was surprised. It wasn't that her father wasn't affectionate, it was just that usually their positions were reversed. She sat on the bench next to him, silent for a moment.

She heard her mother rummaging in the cupboard downstairs and low voices talking quietly.

"Well," he said after a bit, standing up. "We always knew this day would come." Roisin loved hearing her father talk, the slow drawl of is smoky voice. But now he just sounded tired, sounded old.

He made his way downstairs, leaving Roisin sitting alone on the bench. Her father normally carried himself with pride, but she saw the slump of his shoulders that she knew the man downstairs wouldn't detect.

Roisin, the sleuth that she was, tried to listen at the top of the stairs, but she was not able to hear anything. Her mother was concerned, then annoyed (at her father. She knew that tone well). The man was apologetic (for what? Bleeding on their couch?). Her father sounded...not annoyed. Angry. It wasn't a thrashing, raging anger. It was a controlled threat in the voice.

He appeared at the bottom of the stares and looked at her, anger in his eyes. She had never seen him look like that before. It scared her. "Bed. Now. Go." He seemed to upset to even talk in full sentences. She hurried to her room.

She worried for a bit about what was going on downstairs. Would there be violence? She sincerely doubted it, her parents were pacifists. But a teenager can only worry for so long. The voiced quieted. The lights downstairs shut off. Steps came up the stairs.

Her mom poked her head in her room. "He's staying the night." She whispered as her father walked past. She rolled her eyes. "Your father's in a pet. Ignore it. Just try not to clomp down the stairs in the morning." She closed the door behind her. It opened again in a few minutes.

"Love you." Her father whispered into the darkness.

"I love you too," she replied. She could hear it in his voice. All traces of anger were gone.

Her parents were talking in their bedroom. Now she had time to think. Not about her parents guest (an annoying roommate from college maybe?), but about her.

As a child she never realized that other families weren't like her. She never noticed the difference. When she was a child her mother took her to church because she begged. "Sophie goes to church every Saturday mom!" she whined. "Sophie's Jewish dear. That's Temple.". "I want to go to church!" she had yelled and stormed off. Her father had just raised his eyes heaven ward.

"When I was a kid I tried to get _out_ of church, and she wants to go?" He groaned. "I'm not going. Have fun, dear!"

Her mother took her to a church on Sunday (she couldn't remember the denomination). She had enjoyed it for the most part, not that she knew what was going on. She liked the singing and everyone sitting together. They went a few more times. One Sunday her mother was talking with some people on the front steps.

"And you're daughter, such a beautiful chocolate child. Look at her hair!" they all touched her curls. Chocolate child? She wasn't candy! "Her father must be white. Maybe Asian, look at those eyes!"

"I don't want to go back!" She begged, tears in her eyes. She crawled onto her fathers lap and buried her face in his neck. He rubbed her back soothingly.

"Don't worry baby, people, they just ign'ant is all. They've never seen nobody as pretty as you. You don't have to go back if you don't want to." And that was the end of that.

Their religion was that on the ground beneath their feet, the smell of the air. Some people had called her parents hippies. But they really weren't. They just didn't fit those people's boxes.

School had been better at least. She had inherited her fathers eyes, and some people tired to "jump her" as the girls and middle school would say, stalking behind her on her way to class. But most people had gotten over her. She was just a regular person to them. She had made some friends. But no one really "got her" besides her family.

No one at school wanted to go to punk concerts or go and just wander the streets, looking at all the weird people.

Some people bitched. "You trying to be white?", "you trying to be black?" She wasn't enough of anything for anybody. Punk music? For a "black girl" like her? Who ever heard of such a thing! Why, the nerve of that girl! At least music didn't care what color she was, if she wasn't "feminine" enough, if she was a mutant or not. Music didn't care. That piano didn't care.

When she crept down the stairs the next morning there was no one on the couch. She walked into the kitchen and the conversation going on between the three adults halted and they looked at her. Awkward moment.

* * *

You can guess, but you won't find out for sure until the next chapter. Enjoy!


End file.
